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OK! I’m way overdue in replenishing this site with fresh content. I can’t decide if it’s time for a rosy gaze, a bitchfest, or a middle ground. I’ve been rereading Cannery Row which is beguiling and wonderful — sort of a Western version of Damon Runyon’s denizens of the old Times Square. That area near Carmel and Monterey is long gone – too valuable a real estate to stay rusty. I remember the area when I was little – it was gone then too, but there was a lingering sense of the time that Steinbeck so gorgeously captures.

The startling difference is the attitude. Hobos and ne’er-do-wells being pretty much okay with who they are. If you had some sort of roof over your head, food and drink – life was good. Now, nothing ever seems to be enough.

The writing is enviable. Two pages on how to repair a Ford Model T — even if you are not a car person it’s engrossing. Steinbeck’s treatment of his characters is forgiving and affectionate: we are all a little, or a lot, broken and that is perfectly okay. Then there is Doc – the somewhat mysterious marine biologist who likes classical music and his solitude. Doesn’t everybody want to know a Doc? I know I do.

I read Cannery Row when I was a teenager and enjoyed it, but I think you have to be a bit older to fully appreciate it – and to have had some of life’s knocks to understand the characters’ skins. It makes me nostalgic…nostalgic for a time that I wasn’t alive for but can imagine…when the country was uncluttered, unpaved, unchained/unbig-box stored.

Reading Steinbeck had me thinking of a summer when I was 19. I met a friend in Denver and we rode a Honda Gold Wing motorcycle through the Badlands of the Dakotas and other points of interest. How different the landscape is on a bike! Yes, it’s terribly dangerous but I am so glad I did it – it is a beautiful memory. That part of the trip I didn’t share with my mother because she would have freaked out, even though my dad had an old Indian Scout motorcycle which was off limits. It sat in the garage looking beautiful and propping up skis and other paraphernalia.

I’m sorry we didn’t drive the Pacific Coast Highway into Steinbeck country. I would do it now, this time not on a bike and I think even with the changes, I could catch a glimpse of Doc’s tide pool, the Palace Flophouse, Lee Chong’s emporium, and out of the corner of my eye see the flutter of a girl’s dress as she strolls back to the Bear Flag.

“It is the hour of the pearl – the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.”